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Al-Azhar, War Narratives and the Making of Contemporary Egyptian Nationalism
Abstract
The paper discusses the role some Azhari scholars played in mobilizing the Egyptian public to join and support their military during the Suez Crisis of 1956, and the 1967 and 1973 wars. By analyzing the relevant content of al-Azhar's official periodical “Al-Azhar Magazine” and also al-Ahram newspaper published between 1956 and 1982, the paper analyzes the religious framing of these wars as they were being fought and the subsequent construction of these war narrative in Azhari publications. It traces how these wars were often compared or linked to the battles of the early Muslim community, presenting the twentieth-century conflicts as the most recent episodes in the long struggle between Muslims and their “enemies,” broadly defined. The 1973 “victory,” in particular, generated some euphoria that encouraged Azhari scholars to search for religious justifications for the victory. In the process, these scholars “discovered” in the hadith and sira literature some statements attributed to the Prophet Muhammad that prophesied this success, and these statements quickly acquired the status of axioms and eventually became an integral part of the military recruitment process in the following decades. The paper thus argues that some of the key components of the contemporary Egyptian national myth that are now perceived as axiomatic by the Egyptian public and are displayed in museums and other aspects of visual culture are products of the Azhari discourses that followed the 1973 war. In reconstructing these discourses in Egyptian media over several decades, the paper demonstrates how Azhari scholars contributed to popular understandings of the relationship between early Islamic history and twentieth-century military conflicts.
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